Since the U.S. and Israel began attacking Iran, President Trump has bragged about “totally destroying the terrorist regime” with “unparallelled firepower” and “unlimited ammunition.” Yet Iran has still managed to halt the flow of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for about a fifth of the world’s oil. On Saturday, as gas prices neared their highest level in years, Trump’s frustration seemed evident in a Truth Social post: “We have already destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability, but it’s easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along, or in, this Waterway, no matter how badly defeated they are.” America’s high-tech war machine is coming up against inexpensive upstart technologies—and it isn’t clear that we’re winning.
If Trump is wrong about American military dominance, then perhaps he’s also wrong about what he calls American energy dominance. His Administration has long promised to “unleash” American oil; last week, his Energy Secretary, the former fracking executive Chris Wright, used the Iran war to explain why BP would be allowed to drill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. “At a time when Iran and its terrorist proxies attempt to disrupt the global energy supply, the Trump Administration remains committed to strengthening American energy dominance,” Wright said. But America’s fossil-fuel machine should be ready to face an inexpensive upstart technology, too. What if the drone is to warfare as the solar panel is to energy?
Because drones are very cheap, you can make many thousands of them, and hide them anywhere. Smaller unmanned aircraft don’t need a military airstrip to launch. Drones and ballistic missiles can often be intercepted, but the U.S. and Israeli militaries are using expensive weaponry to do that job. Eventually, the gap between a fifty-thousand-dollar drone and a three-million-dollar interceptor becomes important; there were reports, this past weekend, that Israel had begun to run low on interceptors. In other words, inexpensive “small tech” is standing up to expensive high tech—and, over time, the former can seem to gain a kind of advantage.
Something similar may be playing out in the energy sector. America can only achieve its dream of “energy dominance” for as long as the world relies on the enormous and expensive machinery of the fossil-fuel industry: tankers, refineries, gas-fuelled power plants. Much of this infrastructure depends on U.S. companies—which is why Trump recently announced, with uncharacteristic candor, that he didn’t mind the spike in the cost of crude. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote on Truth Social. Of course, the word “we” was doing a lot of work there. Big Oil makes money, and so do the parasitic politicians that the industry supports. The rest of us pay a lot of money. Gas is up nearly a buck since the war began.
And consumers have responded. In the first two weeks of the war, there has been a surge in the number of Americans looking to save money on energy—by asking for quotes on home solar systems and looking up electric vehicles online. We can expect similar trends in other countries. In India, where many kitchens depend on increasingly scarce and costly liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, consumers are racing to buy induction stoves. Many models are out of stock because restaurants have snatched them up; in the early days of the war, some Mumbai eateries shut their doors because they couldn’t find cooking gas and others stopped selling deep-fried or long-simmering foods because they required too much energy. Crematoria couldn’t find gas for their fires.
During Trump’s first term, the United Kingdom pledged to get off fossil fuels by the middle of the century, largely because of climate concerns. The country’s Labour government has stuck to this pledge. (In contrast, the Trump Administration has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Agreement.) But its green-energy policies, such as a plan to help Britons install electric heat pumps, have been under relentless attack by the Tories, the Reform Party, and right-wing tabloids. Nigel Farage, who is the closest that Britain has to a MAGA politician, has decried the “lunacy” of building wind and solar power. One tabloid-favorite claim is that green-energy plans would cost the U.K. nine trillion pounds. Yet the calculation turned out to rest on faulty assumptions: it overstated the costs of net-zero policies and ignored costs of a dirty energy system.
Since the war in the Middle East began, a growing number of voices have been demanding that the U.K. reopen oil fields in the North Sea. But the problem with the “Drill, baby, drill” argument is that gas prices are set by global markets. The U.K. is unlikely to lower its own prices by extracting oil that it controls—and, anyway, it would take years for proposed oil wells to have an appreciable impact. “We’re a price taker, not a price maker,” the U.K.’s energy secretary, Ed Miliband, recently explained on BBC Sunday. Instead, he argued, “We need homegrown clean power that we control.”
Miliband was arguing that the U.K., like any nation, needs the energy equivalent of drones: solar panels, heat pumps, E.V.s, induction cooktops. We need the small tech that, in Miliband’s words, would let us get off the “fossil-fuel roller coaster.” The sickening effect of that roller-coaster ride was made clear in a new report from the Climate Change Committee, which advises the U.K. on its net-zero goals. It showed that coping with the last big energy price shock, from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, cost taxpayers more than forty-one billion pounds. If the U.K. invested a similar amount in homegrown clean energy, the committee found, it would get much of the way toward its net-zero goals. The best way to save Brits money—and to safeguard the country’s independence from tyrants as diverse as Vladimir Putin, Trump, and the mullahs of the Middle East—is to push ahead quickly toward a clean future.
China has already learned this lesson. As the Columbia scholars Erica Downs and Jason Bordoff wrote in Foreign Policy, recently, China has been preparing “for a world in which energy security is inseparable from geopolitics—by electrifying its economy, securing domestic sources of energy, amassing stockpiles, and dominating clean technology supply chains.” The good news is that none of these technologies are secrets, and we can buy them much more cheaply than we can buy oil. And, once we have them, we’ll no longer depend on the flow of oil through an indefensible, roughly twenty-one-mile-wide ditch. Instead, we’ll rely on a continuous stream of photons from the sun—an energy source that will last another five billion years. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-iran-war-is-another-reason-to-quit-oil
